Friday, March 15, 2013

Something Is Happening Here and You Might Know What It Is: Thoughts
on the Vinyl Revival

The media, that vast nebulous barometer of the relative
worth of all we love and hate, lately has been reporting that we are in the
midst of a “vinyl revival”. Some sources,
including one that’s been making the social media rounds this week (http://www.avclub.com/articles/has-the-vinyl-revival-gone-too-far,93610/)
are even daring to suggest that said revival is over; its author, Jason Heller,
wonders about the future of the vinyl revival.
A former record collector himself, Heller attempts to understand why
people are listening to records in greater numbers now than they were, say, ten
years ago and whether they will continue to do so.

First, let me say that, for me, vinyl never went away. Sure, it stepped aside a bit, but I have
always preferred the sound of records to that of CDs and mp3 (not to mention
cassette tape). (The warmth and fidelity
of records played on a good (or even mid-level system) is a subject for another
time.) I started buying records in earnest when I was ten; by eleven, I
considered myself a record collector. By
college, my friends and family dreaded the thought of helping me move the
collection. But by graduate school, new
releases were only coming out on CD and cassette, and the assortment of apartments,
dorms, garrets, offices, and couches where I would awaken demanded that my
listening habits be more mobile (as well as less loud), and I put my records in
storage. I didn’t completely stop buying
vinyl, but I bought maybe twenty albums a year rather twenty a week (used albums, lest any of you think that
I was or am wealthy). Most of my
listening was to CDs and mp3s, but I always knew that, given time and space,
I’d get back to vinyl, and, indeed I knew many people who never left vinyl:
they were mostly musicians (or former musicians) or people in the arts or who
cared a lot about art, the occasional academic, some of them Luddites, some
not. And, even in my biggest collecting
days, as a teenager, only some of my friends and family listened to vinyl; most
listened to cassettes and, eventually, CDs, even the radio. Vinyl has always been here, sometimes less
visible than it is right now, but probably never quite as ubiquitous as
professional nostalgics and the mass media would have us believe.

Cream, Disraeli Gears: an album that's travelled with me for decades.

I first realized there was a “vinyl revival” happening four
or five years ago when an acquaintance who was neither a musician nor an
academic (nor, I must say, what the nameless, faceless media would call a
“hipster”) insisted, at a social event, with no foreknowledge of my record
collecting past, that I listen to his records: a small stack of obvious classic
rock titles (CCR and the Dead, I believe: neither big favorites around these
parts) played on his ghastly lo-fi Crossley turntable recently purchased from
Urban Outfitters (or possibly Best Buy).
We duly listened to “Fortunate Son” or something similar through a layer
of distortion on the machine’s three-inch speaker while this acquaintance
gushed about the greater sound quality of vinyl compared to CDs and mp3s. For our purposes, let’s say I bit my tongue,
felt myself superior, and acknowledged that something was happening here but I
wasn’t sure what it was.

My current modest rig.

In the years since, on some level, I’ve asked myself many of
the questions Jason Heller poses in his A.V.
Club piece. He sidesteps the most
common argument made for the new rise of vinyl, nostalgia either for the music
of the golden age of vinyl (from the 50s to the 80s) or for the performative act
of revisiting the simpler, slower times that produced such music by playing it
on antiquated technology. To be sure, embracing a form of technology abandoned
by most of one’s peers inevitably carries some whiff of nostalgia, if we were
present for vinyl the first time around.
However, the large number of younger vinyl collectors who have no memory
of the omnipresence of vinyl suggests that the revival is not merely one of
nostalgia. Heller proposes that instead
the rise in vinyl listening is a combination of marketing and community. His description of the community of record
collectors he remembers from his past smacks of nostalgia; just because record
stores were, as Bob Mould had it “bulletin boards” for musicians in the 80s
doesn’t make them intrinsically superior to the ways in which musicians now
meet. And he worries that the marketing of overpriced and limited edition vinylwill destroy the current revival by
causing burn-out among buyers. In particular, he sets his wary eye on a new
reissue of Kenny Rogers’s The Gambler. While I also will not be investing in old or
new copy of this thrift-store perennial, I can’t fault either the record label
for releasing it nor listeners for buying it.
And I deliberately say listeners
and not collectors. Sadly, I think this is where Heller’s article
fails to get to the heart of the vinyl revival: his article concentrates far
too much on the acquisition of vinyl, the collecting, and its cost, and not
nearly enough on the listening. It is
the experience of listening, finally, that draws the vast majority of vinyl
revivalists and old hands alike.

Art.

As a teacher of writing, I try to emphasize the fundamental
importance of attention to detail. Great
writing, great literature, and great art require extreme attentiveness: every
word of a great poet or novelist or essayist, every comma, every line break,
every semi-colon must be accounted for.
Our duty as audience, if we are to enter into a conversation with a work
of art, literary, visual, or musical, is to engage with it, if possible, with a
similar degree to that of its creators.
But we are busy people in a busy world, bombarded by information and
art, good and bad. Too often we read
haphazardly. We skim. We talk during movies and text through Mad Men or Breaking Bad. Music might
suffer the most; it is background to our commutes, to doing the dishes, to
having a post-work drink. It’s heard
beneath the clinking of glasses and the chatter of strangers, and, when we do
listen “seriously,” we most often do so with low-quality headphones playing
low-quality mp3s while we jog or ride or pay bills or grade papers. And the art, the music, becomes an accessory
to our lives as lived, our soundtrack.

More art.

The act of listening to music on vinyl records, however, is
not an entirely passive one, nor should it be.
It demands that we participate in the choice to respect art. That is to say that the steps in the process
demand our singular attention in the way that streaming audio, mp3s, or even
CDs do not. We must locate the physical
record album in a record store or a thrift store (or it is ordered online and
we wait for it to be delivered), We must choose, match, and maintain a stereo
system (turntable, cartridge, stylus, receiver or amplifier, pre-amp, and speakers). Finally, the disc must be removed, gently,
from its protective sleeves before it is placed, gently, onto the turntable and
the stylus is placed, oh so gently, onto it.
Some collectors liken these steps and their observance to the practices
involved with other hobbies; many compare the playing of vinyl records to a tea
ceremony so great is the importance placed upon its rituals. What these comparisons miss is that, while
the ritual elements may offer some comfort in their value as nostalgia or some
ersatz connection to a world in which more people worked with their hands, they
are not and should not be the end product or the aim: the aim is the
music.

Playing vinyl is like, in a
secular sense, creating a space for performance, or, in a religious sense,
creating a sacred place, in which we focus, for a brief amount of time, that of
a fifteen to twenty-five minute album side, our attention completely upon Glenn Gould deconstructing Bach or Charlie
Christian inventing the vocabulary of the electric guitar, on Billie Holiday’s
“Strange Fruit” or on the Dead Kennedy’s “Holiday in Cambodia” or even on Kenny
Rogers crooning “The Gambler.” In a
climate in which everything is for sale, is louder, faster, cheaper, and one in
which art is increasingly constructed as “data” for transfer, through legal or
illegal means, the vinyl record demands that we treat art, its creation and its
reception as sacred things, that we make space, in a too-fast consumer society,
for art. And that is why people still
listen to vinyl.